# San Francisco Standard **The San Francisco Standard** is the city's best-funded news outlet — launched in 2021 as Here/Say Media under a 501(c)(4), incorporated that August as a for-profit with $10 million from the Sequoia billionaire [[Michael Moritz]] and his wife Harriet Heyman, and relaunched under its present name in November 2021. Its first editor-in-chief left within a year "citing differences" with co-founder Griffin Gaffney; the current one, Kevin Delaney, arrived in June 2025 when the Standard acquired his workplace newsletter Charter. Moritz's stated purpose was to give San Francisco a newsroom the *Chronicle* could no longer afford; his *New York Times* op-ed of February 2023 describing a city in decline told the rest. ## Why it is in the vault The Standard is the editorial wing of the moderate-Democratic political project that the [[California Tech Exodus Ecosystem]] page maps — GrowSF, TogetherSF, Neighbors for a Better San Francisco — and the case study in how a funder's politics become a newsroom's frame without an instruction being given. Its May 2022 investigation finding three drug-dealing convictions in 2021 under [[Chesa Boudin]] against more than ninety under his predecessor was the single most-cited fact of the [[Chesa Boudin Recall]], and it was accurate; the question the vault asks is which facts get found. Moritz's money also funds the ballot measures the paper covers. That is not capture in the Fox sense — the reporting is real and often good — but it is the pattern the [[Media Capture]] page describes from the other end: a city's information environment rebuilt by one donor around one diagnosis. ## See Also - [[Michael Moritz]] · [[California Tech Exodus Ecosystem]] · [[Chesa Boudin]] · [[Chesa Boudin Recall]] · [[Media Capture]]